With the advent of the newer Raspberry Pi 3 (RPi) with built-in Bluetooth, there are now new options for getting connected to the console of the RPi, without the headache of having to dig up a monitor and keyboard (much less a serial cable with pinouts).

This is especially advantageous when running workshops and hackathons, where connectivity can become problematic. In fact, this specific hack came about from a recent Mozilla hackathon in Berlin, where we realized that we had 10-15 RPi for participants, but not a single monitor, keyboard, serial cable, or other means to connect to the RPis. So it raised the question – why couldn’t we use Bluetooth (BT) as a serial connection to get to the console?

Unlike other tutorials on the web, which assume you already have some console access established, I’ve provided steps which let you do this without any previous connection! To accomplish this, we’ll modify a base image of Raspian-Jesse to allow the RPi to boot into a mode where you can connect via Bluetooth and establish a “virtual” serial connection on startup.